Perception "Thomas Reid's excellent book, Inquiry into the Human Mind... affords us a very thorough conviction of the inadequacy of the senses for producing the objective perception of things, and also of the non-empirical origin of the intuition of space and time. Reid refutes Locke's teaching that perception is a product of the senses. This he does by a thorough and acute demonstration that the collective sensations of the senses do not bear the least resemblance to the world known through perception, and in particular by showing that Locke's five primary qualities (extension, figure, solidity, movement, number) cannot possibly be supplied to us by any sensation of the senses..." The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Ch. 2
I have some thoughts on perception that i wanted to post, so here it goes. It seems to me that there has to be a core ability/principle in man that turns raw sensation into perception. If colors are all in the head then an object doesn't "look like" anything. But then our eyes, perhaps the greatest organ, does not know reality. Does it see shape at least? In combination with touch, perhaps. But colors are just as much "there in front of us" as the solidity on which the colors lie. Things wouldn't even be black and white or translucent on there own. "In themselves" no sight could see them. So it seems to me that that there must be a soul in man that sees through the eyes and touches the object of vision in ocular activity. Science says all we see is light and that the objects are images in the brain (the world is in the brain?). George Berkeley was key in the development of this. But when I say soul I
Do not necessarily mean something spiritual. It could be a core principle that is more than spiritual (actually divine) or it could be a material principle (stemming from QM?) which is even more truly material than the world we are trying to know. That there is something unique in man in this way (although unique only as special and foundational, for animals may have it too) can be shown by how children learn language. We all know that if we come across ancient scrolls on which is written a language unlike any we know, we could never translate it. Yet this is the very situation a child is in. If i show a toddler a ball and say "ball", how does the child know that the word ball refers to that object instead of only to its extension, firure, solidity, or number. If i say to him "you jumped", how does he know the word "you" doesn't apply to the jumping? Of course this all happens in a complex context over time, but i still believe everyone would be autistic so to say without a natural core principle uniting our minds to each other. Even if a child is resting on the mother's breast and she says "love" as the child is feeling love, could not the word love mean rather "mother" instead of the act of love itself. Without a place to start we could never have common communication with each other. So I believe and think that we all have bodies that have all kind of natural intelligences in them, and the that mind is a limitless faculty that is designed to know people and the world itself. If we can't know the world, how can we know other people?